Tool’s slave to fashion
TOOL fans came to grips with Maynard James Keenan’s extra-musical life when he founded Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars in 2005. Now the aggressively reclusive frontman is giving them another unlikely side project to reckon with: a turn as fashion plate.
Puscifer, a nebulous entity that’s equal parts clothing line and cabaret-industrial rock band, has been a less-than-serious solo pursuit of Keenan’s for years. He used it as an alter-ego opening for Tenacious D at comedy-rock shows around town (another alias, Umlaut, was an improvisational hard-core band). But anyone who caught Puscifer’s Trent Reznor-as-strip-club-DJ contribution to the “Underworld: Evolution” soundtrack in 2006 should expect a full album sometime this fall.
“There’s a lot of humor that gets missed in my other projects,” Keenan said. “Sometimes people respond, and sometimes they respond by saying I speak to them in their dreams.”
Puscifer’s revolving-door lineup includes Nine Inch Nails collaborator Danny Lohner, his sometimes cohort Milla Jovovich and Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford. There’s little confirmed in the way of a title, tracklist or release date yet, but expect plenty of glitchy programming, martial guitar thrash and bone-dry lyrics like these from the track “Rev. 22:20”: “If I’ve got to sin to see her again, then I’m gonna lie, lie, lie.”
In the meantime, fans can (at www.puscifer.com) help themselves to a Puscifer-brand T-shirt, sweatshirt or lady’s undergarment. Keenan designed the demonic-fertility-goddess logo that decorates most of the clothes, collaborating with Paul Frank on a series of wallets and Tool’s Adam Jones on one T-shirt that’s the ne plus ultra of mom jokes.
Keenan’s no stranger to gender-bending costumes and elaborate face paint in Tool. But dressing his audience is proving to be a bit more complicated.
“I’m a fashion nightmare,” Keenan said. “It’s a learning process, and I’m finding this is not the easiest thing to do. Who wants to lay out thirty grand just to make a cool hoodie?”
Still no label, but they have a film
CLAP Your Hands Say Yeah knows from potentially self-sabotaging career decisions. The screwy indie-pop band remains intentionally label-less two years after its self-titled independent debut set the blogosphere aflame. The group followed with the darker and more textured “Some Loud Thunder” all on its lonesome.
So it makes sense that the quintet’s first big-screen appearance is in “The Great Buck Howard,” a film about a young scamp ditching grad school to apprentice with a fading magician. The band members are contributing original songs to the score and play themselves in a scene shot recently at the Marriott in Marina del Rey. They appear as the house band at a hotel lounge where stars Colin Hanks and Emily Blunt are having a reflective moment.
“It should be the easiest thing to do, to play yourself,” said singer Alec Ounsworth, before the shoot. “But it feels more like we’ll be playing ourselves playing ourselves. I’m leaning towards pretending there aren’t cameras there.”
The band is in good company on the film’s list of “as themselves” cameos, joining “Star Trek’s” George Takei. Ounsworth didn’t expect to run into the film’s other costars, Tom Hanks and John Malkovich, while on the set, but the wild-haired, slightly unhinged vocalist does have an idea about who he’d want to play himself if he were unavailable.
“Jack Nicholson,” he said. “I think he’d do a great job.”
Listen to the latest dance floor Rage
AND in the Potential-Trends-We’d-Like-to-See-More-Of department, a blazing club remix of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” by French DJ SebastiAn is making rounds on the interwebs, proving that Coachella’s dance-oriented Sahara Tent and the alt-rock main stages weren’t that far apart after all.
Trading the gut-busting funk of the original for amphetamine-fueled synthesizers and a jerking house beat, the edit finds a seemingly impossible common ground between Rage’s jackhammer, call-to-arms polemics and the lithe delirium of SebastiAn’s labelmates on Ed Banger Records.
File-sharing gnomes know where to look, but www.discobelle.net should have it for a little while longer.
Your move, Diplo -- the first crack at a Baltimore club mix of “Bulls on Parade” won’t wait forever.
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